Products maintained by an entity are generally tracked through inventory records. The inventory records maintain a count of each type of product in inventory. The price the product costs when purchased and its vintage, or year of purchase, is also tracked in the inventory record for accounting purposes, such as to schedule depreciation of the products in inventory. Thus, it is important to maintain an accurate inventory record as a part of an entity's bookkeeping practices.
Because the items in inventory are constantly in flux, inventory records must be frequently updated. Items in inventory may be maintained in a warehouse, used in the field, and/or discarded. A periodic recount of the inventory is performed and is compared to the inventory record to reconcile any changes in the inventory with the count of the inventory record. Often, the comparison of the recount to the inventory record results in items being found that are not accounted for by the count of the inventory record. This situation requires a write-on, or an instance of a product being added to the count of the inventory record.
When a write-on occurs, a price and vintage must be assigned to the one or more added instances to the count for the product. For products in inventory that are not serialized, there is no way to determine the actual price and vintage information. To address this situation, the conventional practice has been to arbitrarily assign a price and vintage for write-ons by searching an inventory record for the product to find the earliest vintage and assigning this earliest vintage to the write-ons. Then, a price known for that vintage is assigned as the price for the write-on in the inventory record.
This conventional approach has several flaws that increase the inaccuracy of the inventory record. Because the products in inventory may span several years, it is highly unlikely that all products to be written-on have an actual vintage and price that are close to the earliest vintage and corresponding price. Furthermore, a particular product may have a price that varies during a given vintage year, and assigning the price corresponding to the earliest vintage increases inaccuracy for this additional reason. Also, inventory records are subject to keying errors during data entry, and the price and vintage values may often be incorrectly entered. Therefore, the earliest vintage and/or price that is arbitrarily assigned to a write-on may be a vintage or price that has been entered in error, and additional inaccuracy results.
Therefore, there is a need for an inventory reconciliation system that provides more accurate pricing and vintaging for write-ons.